|
I am standing in the middle of Times Square, stimulus point for 23 million visitors to New York City each year. It is the only spot in the USA where zoning laws require buildings to display some form of advertising. Tourists walk by, men in red unitogs sweep up gum wrappers and Starbucks napkins. Even while drowning in this billion kilowatt visual cacophony, familiar sights resonate. The Coca-Cola sign. Budweiser. Samsung. Smirnoff.
How is it, I wonder, that even in this illuminated blur of logoforms, some names mean something, while others do not? Why do some names - Sony, Starbucks, Nike - shape emotions, while others remain neutral?
While it's easy to explain how Coke has become a brand after 100 years of advertising and marketing efforts, it is inexplicable how Starbucks has become a brand in a fraction of that time, with virtually no advertising (in the beverage category, no less).
Traditional explanations for Starbucks point to a great product. Great locations. Great in-store experience. Great training: the baristas behind the counter in London seem the same as those in New York and Los Angeles. Yet, we know of products that have had great innovation, end caps at WalMart, great service and great experiences, yet they failed. In fact, 9 out of 10 new products fail consistently.
Clearly, something else is going on, but what?
After working with Fortune 500 companies for 20 years, I decided to find out. The result of my quest led me not to traditional marketing explanations, but to fundamental questions like, Why do we believe in what we believe? Why do we believe in where we work, where we live, the clothes we wear, the products we buy, or even who we are?
Many people talk about brands, but Primal Branding is not as much concerned with "brands" - which is a jargon bucket - as it is with how to design communities of people. Sometimes we call these communities brand loyalists or customers. Other times we refer to them as patriots, fans, geeks, and advocates. Even the most sales-oriented "push" marketing companies - where the notion of "brand" is anathema and emphasis is on making the deal, you may not think about brands, but you do think a lot about the group of people that prefer your products and services, your customers.
There is a pattern. It is a pattern like language, math, binary code and genetic code. And it is just as powerful. Those "brands" that have all the pieces of code resonate with the public. Those that don't, don't. (By brands we mean any product, service, personality, organization, political or social cause, even civic community searching for public appeal.)
Primal branding is an idea that can be scrawled on a matchbook cover. It boils down to the fact that brands are belief systems. Once you think of a brand as a belief system, you automatically get all the things that enterprise spends billions of dollars trying to obtain: trust, relevance, vision, values, leadership.
All belief systems have seven things that help people to believe.
The first is a creation story. If you think of brand as narrative, this is the beginning of your story. It's about two guys named Steve who started building personal computers in their parent's garage. Nike started with a waffle iron. UPS was started by a fifteen year-old with a bicycle. "Who are you?" begins the narrative. We've all walked into a movie after it's started playing and spent the rest of the movie trying to figure out what's going on. In the marketplace, of course, consumers don't stop to figure you out. They just keep going.
Even if you have a personal creation story. Where were you born? Where did you go to high school? Did you go to college? Where? Are you single? Married? Kids?
Branding pioneer Jack Trout asserts that the creation story is critical, simply because that story "is often at the heart of being different and successful."
Once we know who you are, what are you about? All belief systems have a creed that declares what you believe in. Do you believe in life after death? That all men are created equal? Do you "think different"?
Third. Once we know where you're from and what you're about, show us who you are. All belief system have icons-quick flashes of meaning that sum up who you are and what you're about. The Nike swoosh. The stars and stripes. A picture of Osama bin Laden. Icons are not just images, but they spark the other senses as well. The smell of Cinnabons in the airport concourse, the taste of Oreos, the sound of the Intel gliss that ends television commercials.
Products and packaging can also be icons. The VW Beetle, Mini Cooper, iPod, OXO kitchen tools, jewelry designer David Yurman's chains, Netflix's red envelope, and amazon.com's grinning box are all examples of how product skins shape meaning.
Belief systems have rituals. These are the repeated positive or negative interactions you have with your public. Some rituals, like stopping at Starbucks in the morning, can be positive. Other rituals, like calling your bank, can be negative. There are many rituals that we don't even think about. Doctor appointments. Going to the dry cleaners. Taking your car to the dealer for the 10,000 mile tune-up. Holding your camera phone in the air at a rock concert (to take a photo or let someone at home listen in).
All belief systems have specialized words that have special meaning for those who believe. If you want to be a member of a group, whether that group is soccer fans or computer geek, you have to know the words. If you're a soccer fan, you have to know the teams, the players, the stats, the plays and the championship games. If you want to be a computer geek and you don't know what "MS-DOS" means, you're not going to go very far. Doctors, lawyers, advertising guys, microbiologists, film directors, football coaches, painters, board directors, mathematicians, truck drivers, teachers, recycling specialists, marathon runners and many others, all have their own vocabulary that helps identify them as a member of the group.
Belief systems also have a set of people who don't believe. For every trend there is a counter trend, for every revolution a counter revolution. For every free range chicken, there is a factory chicken. In marketing, knowing who we are not, helps to identify who we are. And it can uncover huge opportunities. If a group of people do not want sugar in their colas, we can invent sugar-free. If they do not want caffeine, we invent de-caf. If they do not want to drive gas guzzling cars, we engineer new fuel-efficient cars and new energy technologies.
Finally, all belief systems have a leader: a person who set out against all odds to recreate the world according to their own point of view. Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Richard Branson. Dr. Martin Luther King. Oprah. These people frequently have humble beginnings and legendary success. We are not often interested in tales of everyday struggles pitted against ordinary odds. And while these larger than life figures loom in the stratosphere, there are also the project leaders, team leaders, line managers and supervisors down below who must lead on a daily basis. Great or small, they are all responsible for imbuing into the organization the pieces of primal code.
These seven pieces form the primal code: the creation story, creed, icons, rituals, sacred words, nonbelievers and leaders. They are the basis for belief systems that inherently attract people who want to believe. These groups - whether it's two people in a room, or two billion on a continent - form communities of people who surround products and services like Nike, Apple, Starbucks. They surround personality brands like Oprah, Martha, or U2. They surround organizations (ie. Corporate culture). They surround social and political causes, even civic communities. They can even surround abstract concepts like global thermonuclear war, global warming, and gravity.
Take Coke. The creation story is about Dr. John Pemberton creating a carbonated drugstore beverage. The creed is about "the real thing" or, if you prefer, "Coke is it". The icons are the shapely bottle profile, the Coke red ribbon, not to mention the sweet fizzy blast you taste on a hot summer day. The rituals are the classic frosty bottle chug that has become cliché, not to mention the love tryst that has been winked at in Coke advertising for 100 years. The sacred words include "Coke", "It's the real thing", "Coke is it", and other words exclusive to the Coke experience. (For Starbucks, the sacred words would be "iced grande decaf skinny latte, please.") Nonbelievers, or pagans, would be people who drink Pepsi, or people who just don't like soft drinks. The leader - ignoring for a moment corporate management, bottlers, and retailers - is you.
Or iPod. While it's hard to separate the iPod from the Apple creation story, it has to do with bringing Steve Jobs back into the Apple empire and the redesign of personal computing and Apple Corps. The creed is about delivering sound and pictures in portable ways. The icons are Jonathan Ives' smart design of the iPod skin; the ear pods. The rituals are self-evident: wearing the iPod, downloading, recharging - as well as the unique way the iPod scrolls and manages its contents. The sacred words are the lexicon that surrounds the "i" universe - iPod, iTunes, iPhoto - a vernacular that followers have stolen. Nonbelievers are other MP3 players, as well as manufacturers like Sony and Samsung, and people who are just stuck on (or is that "with"?) other technologies.
Is it working? Try taking an iPod away from its owner and replacing it with any other MP3 player. (On the other hand, try giving the owner of any other MP3 player an iPod.)
But Primal Branding is not just about products and services, although we have bared the bones of a hundred different products and services like the two above. Primal Branding is about providing resonance and meaning for what we believe in.
Do you believe in the existence of al Quaida? Before 9/11, if someone had told you that a pan-global, paramilitary organization threatened to kill not just military personnel, but also you and your family, you might not have believed it. The sad hammer of truth is that the leaders of many Western nations did not fully believe. Following 9/11, a tale unfolded of a militaristic group that spans the globe. Today, partly because it contains all seven pieces of primal code, virtually everyone believes such an organization exists.
The creation story starts in the refugee camps and underprivileged nations of the world. The creed is to render terror among Western military and civilian populations. The icons are the twin Trade Towers burning, the black hooded figures, and Osama bin Laden. The ritual of terror is accompanied by the kidnappings, random bombings, follow-up calls to CNN claiming responsibility - all superimposed with the ritual of surprise. The sacred words include treatises on the "jihad", and the final words uttered before the explosion, "Allah Akbar!". Nonbelievers, at least from the Western perspective, are Christian and non-Islamic. The leaders are Osama bin Laden and others known and unknown.
Okay, are you ready to take a flying leap? Then, take a concept like gravity. Remember Sir Isaac Newton and his apple? The creation story. The creed - at least in popular parlance - might be "what goes up must come down". The icons are the dropping apple, the sensation of falling. Rituals? This might be a stretch, but you can almost propose that the rituals have been anti-gravitational - for example, man's quest for flight. Sacred words include gravity's corresponding vocabulary like "gravitational pull". Nonbelievers would be few, but imagine someone who believes in another form of physics. The leader would be Sir Isaac Newton, as well as the thousands of scientists, teachers and others who promote the notion that gravity actually exists.
(Does it? Remember that people also once thought that the earth was flat; people trying to support the fact that the earth might be round were burned at the stake. Such is the power of belief.)
We have determined the primal code for hundreds of products and services, even comparative newcomers like Netflix, Ecko, American Apparel and Google resonate with primal code.
But think about so-called brands like MCI, Goodrich tires or Lestoil. Active businesses, certainly, but it is difficult if not impossible to define any pieces of primal code for them. The result is that you feel nothing for them, and they have no option but to compete on price. Once other products that are faster, cheaper, stronger, more powerful, more durable, or have some other differentiating benefit comes along, they will be swept off the shelves and no one will care. (In the opposite extreme, remember what happened when Coke tried to pull its Classic formula off the shelves a decade ago. There was practically a consumer revolution.)
Between the extremes of Starbucks and Lestoil lie the thousands of products and services with the opportunity to be reverse-engineered and imbedded with the sparkle of primal code. Once you surround an idea with primal code (having all seven is sublime), you bubble up from the froth of the tens of thousands of things struggling to attract our attention. You resonate. You become meaningful. You become desired.
Primal branding is both actionable and transformational. We hold Primal Digs at companies, where we create culture inside organizations and help to operationalize the brand. The outcomes are a mission-driven workplace where people feel they belong. The organization becomes more efficient, retention is better, productivity is higher.
Primal Branding also defines the code on how to launch new products and services that people believe in - and it helps re-engineer existing products. In today's complex, parity world, who your customer "feels better" about is called preference. And we all know that preference creates high value sales.
When people believe, they belong. When they belong to the group that surrounds your product or service, they are willing to advocate their belief to others. Remember the last time you moved? Where did you find out about the best grocery store? The best church? The auto mechanic who wouldn't rip you off? Probably from someone who already "belonged" to their group, someone who preferred them above all others and was willing to advocate that preference. In other words, they are able to deliver the form of advertising that traditional wisdom tells you money can't buy. Word of mouth.
Primal branding is a process that can help you engineer products and services - even abstract social and political notions - and create communities of people to surround them. It provides an opportunity to provide products and services that people can believe in.
The only thing it asks is whether you want to be just another product on the shelf, or do you want to become a desired and popular piece of the culture? If your answer is the latter, then Primal Branding is for you.
|
